30.01 Playlist...

Greetings all / Saludos por todos,
On Monday night I spoke with Dave O´Rama, an old friend and collegue from my college radio days at CRSC Seneca College in Toronto, Canada….he was the Program Director and I, the Music Director, and there was also Steve and Mike Brownlee (where are you Mike?) among others who contributed a wealth of musical knowledge and love.

Dave introduced me to Defunkt through a mural of an album cover on the wall of CRSC, then proceeded to pull out the record and marry it with the stylus. Everything from James White and the Contortions, Hairy Beanball & Ed Special, The DeepThroat Soundtrack, Burning Spear, The Rheostatics, The Gun Club, The Butthole Surfers, ´80´s Hip hop, Parliament/Funkadelic got an airing….

Back to the conversation with Dave, so I asked him what was giving him a musical woody, he is now at CHLY radio in the Canadian Pacific region http://www.chly.ca/ he said Hazmat Modine among other things. The name faintly rang a bell. After we said our goodbye´s and promises to keep in touch, I checked the web for Hazmat and naturally came across www.myspace.com/hazmatmodine. So I´m looking at the still image of the group, and immediately the phrase “I know them” came lept to the forefront of my grey matter.

Click.

Fun-da-Mental and Hazmat Modine were invited to perform at the Golden Mask festival in Moscow last year, but I never got to see them onstage, only in the hotel lobby waiting for the bus to take them to soundcheck/show or in the dining room!
Hazmat music is correctly described as a mixture of whorehouse Blues, Reggae, Country, Klezmer, Gypsy-tinged entity. Well it would if it´s got duelling harmonicas, Sheng (Chinese mouth organ), Cimbalon (Romanian hammered dulcimer) trumpets, tuba, along side the guitars, bass, drums and a good dose of sly humour and wit!

A joy….damn, what a shame I never got to witness it there and then! Oh well, for those not in the immediate vicinity of their impending live shows, go seek in your record shop or favourite source for the treats.
http://www.hazmatmodine.com/ http://www.rootsworld.com/interview/hazmat.shtml

The past week also brought communication with John Hutnyk, http://hutnyk.blogspot.com/ He´s a professor at Goldsmith´s University, and participated in one of the talks at the Clandestino Festival in Gothenborg where Aki (yes, the notorious terrorist-apologist Aki Nawaz) and I dropped a Fun´da´Mental DJ set a few years ago. John has twice invited me to talk with his students about the politics and presentation of Fun-da-mental videos. Coming back to last week, John and I were discussing this idea of a compilation that has been sitting in my brain for the last couple years. This year is the 40th anniversary of the death of Ernesto ´Che´ Guevara, and I wanted to compile an album of contemporary artists who have felt touched by revolutionary spirit, thought, actions, etc. The idea is not for all the music to focus on ´Che´ himself, but for expression of whatever the contributing artists feel regarding being subject to living on their knees for the sake of ´The Man´or ´System´. John has came up with a phrase which I immediately responded, “That should be the title!” So, we are going with “The Guevara Convention”.

Emails have been sent out to collegues, friends, associates etc. and so far the response has been good…we have Dj/Rupture, Filastine, Coldcut, Fermin Murguza, Fun-da-mental, Las Ratas, DJ Klandestino, Dr. Das, Shaheen (former Prophets of da City producer and vocalist) and IR, saying ´yeah´ musically. Cecilia Parsberg http://this.is/parsberg/ put me in touch with Ana from Uruguay who was 14 years old when Che was killed. She became active in the Marxist Tupac Amaru group in Uruguay. Ana said she´ll provide some words for the text, really looking forward to reading what she has to say.

fyi: The following link is for the animation that Cecilia and co-conspiritors put together about the Israeli occupation and for which they asked me to provide a soundtrack.http://this.is/TheWall/

Javi Jiminez, a teacher and music writer here in Tenerife has also come on board, so we are moving. All we need now, are a few more artists and a label, distributor. The potential for this is huge. Oh, I must say, inspiration for this album also came about through an album that Fun-da-Mental soundman Bernard Maiquez lent me several years ago, El Che Vive!, (Last Call Records) which was released to coincide with the 30th anniversary of ´Che´´s death. I ended my first DJ stint in Tenerife (an AntiWar night at the original Cafeoteca de Arte in Puerto de la Cruz/2003) with the classic ´Hasta Siempre´ by Carlos Puebla y sus Tradicionales, from the aforementioned album, and the place erupted….everybody sang along! My girlfiend´s mum knows the song, kids know the song….so a chord was struck! If you got something for this project, please bring it. More as it happens....

This week´s Ear Conditioning program went a little like this….. Found some gems, Morgan Craft & Metamussik, Rude HiFi, the Ud master Mumir Bashir. You have never heard Sicilian tuna fishermen singing alongside an infectious raucous noise until you´ve heard ´Hurra Hurrey´from BioMuse www.myspace.com/biomuse. Fresh dirty hip hop from Data MC www.myspace.com/datamc straight outta Germany.
Experimental electronic music from Venezuela courtesy of www.microbiorecords.net. That was a bit of a suprise, sincere apologies for temporarily putting ´Venezuelan music´in a pidgeon-hole!
For the mash-up heads, my former partner in the Nation World Service and Audio Sharpnel, Master Volume has presented a collision of Damien Marley and Suzi Quatro, Welcome to Glamrock! http://audioshrapnel.multiply.com/He does that kinda thing. His final mix for the FDM radio session on XFM was spellbinding. The hosts, Eddie and James hadn´t heard anything like it...something like 68 tracks in 38minutes. Yes, there is a mix floating out there that has 800tracks in 38minutes or so, I know, I know, I hope to get it this week, okay.

Stroking the pole this week then was.....

Golem / Warsaw is Khelm (JDub) www.myspace.com/golemrocks
SJ Esau / Cat Story (Anticon)
BioMuse / Yellow Wing Sphex (NoLabel)
Annie Anxiety / Rise Dub (Echo Beach)
Mumir Bashir / Nahawand (Voix de l´Orient)
Mercury Rev / The Dark is Rising (V2)
Ginger Baker Trio / Ramblin´ (Atlantic)
Lobi Traore / Deni Kelen Be Koko (Honest Jons/Astralwerks)
Cedric IM Brooks / Shaft (Soul Jazz)
Rude HiFi / Elzn in Dub (Metak)
Hazmat Modine / Yesterday´s Morning *Live on Russian TV (mp3)
Morgan Craft & Metamussik / P.Melank RA (mp3)
Audio Shrapnel / Welcome to Glamrock (mp3)
Revolting Cocks / Physical (WaxTrax)
Data MC / Madball & Wot Bout It (mp3)
Method Man / Release Yo´Delf *Prodigy Remix (DefJam/Playground)
Vast Aire feat. MC Doom / Super Friendz *Edan Remix (mp3)
BioMuse / Hurra Hurrey (NoLabel)
Oil for Food / Nobody´s Colony (Microbio)
Sajeed Jafreey & Sally Dexter reading The Art of Love (Virgin)
Ghislain Poirier / Pumpa Pimp
Digital Underground / Doowhatchalike (TommyBoy)
Basemental Platform / Lumenjack (Silvahneedle)
URoy / DJ Phonics (Ariwa/Everlasting)

Thanks to Dave O´Rama, Tommy Pop, AudioShrapnel, Wal of Data MC, Mohamed from Lebanon for pointers and contributions. Also to the two callers who phoned up to say the station lost transmission power for a bit. As always, for those in Tenerife, the program is repeated Saturday midnight, Radio Pimienta 100.3FM For those with the new technology, well, we can´t serve you yet with online broadcasting, but I am looking into podcasting to take things to another level.
PEace